Gas Box

The tidy, immaculately dressed Chicago-based crew slowly marched down the aisle. Passing each row, the upbeat flight attendant's words had a cadence and muted zip to them, like the tapping of a snare drum. "Care for something to drink?". Pause. Handing over a tomato juice, next, "Care for something to drink?" Repeat. This was their first lap of a 3 hour morning flight, and coffee had a cameo role. Its fragrance made a pleasant appearance, like spotting a fabled king's robe flowing through the alleys of a medieval city. Scent is the strongest sense associated with memory, but memory is also strongly tied to ritual and habit. Every morning, coffee's reign over my sense of smell is predictable. Like a British monarch, coffee is loved by many, even if you are not under its rule, has undeniable connections to colonialism, and has been steeped in ceremony for centuries.

On this morning of solo travel, within the pressurized confines of an aircraft, the black beverage's aroma was both violently and mercilessly deposed by a larger and far more powerful insurgent force. Somebody in the immediate vicinity had let out a horrifically pungent fart. Had a municipal SWAT team been onboard, they would agree unanimously that this particular batch of human exhaust had an uncanny tactical potency for clearing a room.

My unexpecting nose was caught flat-footed. Completely off-guard. Nothing in the pre-flight safety video covered this scenario. Accompanying the initial shock to my olfactory system, I instinctively tried fastening my shirt collar over my nose, like the overhead oxygen masks during the unlikely event of a water landing. Holding my cup of coffee in one hand and book in the other, my reaction was delayed just enough. It was too late. By my best estimates, there were perhaps upwards of a dozens victims within the Splash Zone. Although any clear expressions of contempt among my fellow passengers were withheld. More on that later.

This was a fast moving gas; it glided through my nasal passages, dove to the back of my throat, instantly soaking into my lungs. I literally had to muffle my coughing. My body, violated, had been hijacked and transformed into a vessel, a sponge for a vile substance. That poor cup of coffee never stood a chance.

The first fart, which over the course of the trip I came to call in my head simply “The Reek,” possessed an unbridled audacity and daring attitude to completely shatter all bindings of social protocol. The only word in my immediate vocabulary to describe it is "extraordinary ". At that altitude and proximity to outer space, it is only fitting to mention The Reek in the same breath (or gasp) as the likes of Chuck Yeager and John (Motherfucking) Glenn. An aeronautical Pioneer in the truest sense. United Flight 533 would never be the same.

Reek was only the first, but what followed can only be described using esoteric medical terminology as a "Macy's Thanksgiving Day sized Doo Doo Parade of Farts". Each passing of gas equally vile as the last.The maker of The Reek, still at-large and anonymous to this day, may have initially been coy to share their orphaned creation with the rest of the cabin. But any traces of apprehension or cloaked shame they may have had were expunged and summarily jettisoned, not unlike the dumping of human refuse from the undercarriage of an airplane. If one were to scientifically and precisely measure the time between each fart, the resulting data would show a wave function with decreasing amplitude. It would look like a bullwhip.

It soon became indiscernible when one fart had ended and another began. What started as a slow-drip leak escalated and snowballed into a relentless cascade of odor. Ironically, the only refuge from this assault of the senses was the lavatory. A lesser of two evils I suppose.

With Reek's presence, I first experienced feelings of contempt and outrage. But as the Fart Parade marched on and a cloud of ass became a permanent fixture in Coach, my mind drifted towards the Science, the Biology of it all.

"How is this possible? How is one human body capable of such a ghastly horror? Should I say something about this?" "But seriously how is the human body capable of this?" "Are there health problems associated with prolonged exposure to this much gas?"

I couldn’t muster the focus to get through a single page of my book. I felt trapped. I looked for a mental escape hatch, but with the airplane's Wi-Fi being very spotty, Google, Quora, and Yahoo! Answers weren't going to rescue my mind any time soon. As a strong river smooths stones over time, the relentless acidic stink stream eroded away my sharp mechanical logic. The melange of emotions, wonder, and sense of powerlessness somehow reminded of a time I was standing at the bottom of a lush river valley in rural Tibet, with mountain walls so tall you had to look straight up to see the top. When you find yourself in the presence of something truly powerful in nature, and you realize how small you truly are, you cannot help but simply be in awe.

My sense of indignation then acquiesced to a Stockholm Syndrome-esque empathy; I began harboring a genuine concern for an anonymous travel companion and the structural integrity of their gastrointestinal tract. The procession of The Fart Parade continued and after about an hour of stink bombardment, the war of attrition was beginning to take its toll on my willpower and sense of well being. While I have never been to prison, I do watch gritty dramas like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, and in my bolted pleather seat I began to feel the psychological weight of being held captive for prolonged periods of time against your will in a hostile environment. It changes you. The Fart Parade acted as a smelling salt for my dormant neuroses and hibernating paranoia,

"Is this a social experiment? Why the fuck is nobody else reacting to this? Is this a conspiracy?" Alright, we're flying into Denver, there's urban legends of a Freemason city underneath the Denver airport. Is this part of a Freemason conspiracy!!?"

My growing awareness of my tactile surroundings magnified my sense of loneliness and despair, a familiar trigger from my lifelong fear of being in open water, Thalassaphobia. My weary gaze drifted towards the window, looking out over a cloudless horizon over the Great Plains, I had the realization that I was in a vast ocean, Flyover Country.

I spent the remainder of the flight staring out the window, sulking in a cloud of my own anguish and sulfur that somehow went unnoticed by every other goddamn person on the plane. I then started writing this note that you are reading, just to cope with the trauma of it all.

I was able to finally come up for air once we deplaned. The sweet Rocky Mountain air hit me like a cigarette after sex. With each breath my bottled up misery and angst poured out of me and evaporated and danced away into the eggshell ceiling above, along with the residual traces of The Reek.